


His Last Report

by JACmRob



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist (Anime 2003)
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Holocaust, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, World War II, ed sees mustang as his father
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-12
Updated: 2016-01-12
Packaged: 2018-05-13 09:48:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5703235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JACmRob/pseuds/JACmRob
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ed writes to the Colonel after getting home from Europe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	His Last Report

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place imagining CoS never happened, 8 years after Ed disappeared to Europe at the end of the 2003 anime. just an imagining of him unloading his emotional baggage on his ol' father figure.

_Dear Colonel Bastard._

_I guess you must’ve heard that I’m back now, so I thought I’d get this out of the way before you come bothering me. I’m resigning from the military.  Or rather, I’m going to hold on to my killed-in-action status.  I’ll keep collecting that pension though; I think Al and Winry have been enjoying the extra money._

_Guess I should also say something to address what I’m sure is going to be an annoying barrage of questions about where I’ve been the past eight years.  Consider this my final report.  Most of it’s going to sound crazy so bear with me.  Hell, you probably won't believe a word of it, but I guess it doesn't matter if you do. I don't know.  Maybe I am crazy.  But I opened the Gate back up when I returned Al to his body, and I got sent through to the other side for good.  I’m sure you’ve been curious about what’s there; how can you study alchemy and not wonder? I woke up in_ _another world, a world like ours in a lot of ways but vastly different in others.  I told you it sounded crazy, didn't I? There’s no alchemy there, but they have other sciences that are even more advanced than ours.  They’ve developed weapons that rival alchemy in their destruction, especially when some uniform with an agenda is giving the orders.  I guess that’s another way that world was like Amestris.  And it’s maybe why the war there was so devastating—too much power in the hands of people who treat humans like pawns._

_Yeah bastard, a war.  A terrible one.  They called it a world war, because nearly every powerful country in the world was involved.  But it was started by the Fuhrer of the country I was living in, a kind of parallel to Amestris called Germany.  I was studying at a university in a city called Munich when it began, trying to find any hint of a way back home.  I don’t know if I would have been drafted if I stayed in Munich, but there was this girl, Rose.  Her people were one of the groups targeted by the Germans—the Nazis—for extermination.  She was leaving Germany, so I decided to go with her._

_Well, it was more complicated than that.  She fell in love with me, and I guess I kind of loved her too.  Her people—the Romani—had strict laws about sex and marriage and what women were allowed to do, so we always had to sneak around.  Even before the war, the Romani were treated pretty badly by everyone—they had a reputation as thieves and con artists, and no one trusted them so they didn’t exactly trust anyone who wasn’t Romani either.  I think Rose wanted me to marry her, but I was an outsider and it would have never been allowed.  Still, they could be incredibly kind and generous, and they took me in when I left the university and let me travel with them for a while._

_Anyway, the Romani were just one of the groups of people who the Nazis targeted, and after the war began we started hearing rumors of these camps, how they would round up the Romani and the Jews and homosexuals and cripples and put them on trains going to the camps, and how no one ever came back.  We were staying in a town called Locow at the time. Rose tried to persuade me to go back to Germany since I was blond and and had light skin and looked enough like what the Germans thought the perfect race ought to look like.  She said if they didn’t find out about my limbs I’d be fine, but I couldn’t do it.  Her family caught us together and kicked me out of the caravan. I thought they were going to forbid her from ever seeing me again, but then the German occupation moved through the area almost overnight._

_Rose and her family were going to flee with the caravan, but I went to her father and offered to hide them in my apartment instead.  I said I’d use my connections to the university back in Munich to get them on a ship across the ocean, that it was a debt repaid for taking Rose’s virginity. I guess he was really impressed or grateful or whatever, because he told me I could marry Rose even though I wasn’t Romani.  I really thought I was doing the right thing, Colonel.  I thought the caravan would never make it out of Poland and they’d all be sent to the camps.  Maybe they did make it.  Maybe I stole Rose’s chance at surviving then and there, all because I wanted to keep her with me.  I guess I’ll never know.  Before we made it out of Lucow the Germans raided my apartment.  They shot Rose and her mother in front of me.  And then her father and her brother and I were sent to the camps._

_I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.  I don’t know if you’d even care.  I guess I needed to tell someone, and the truth would break Al’s heart.  And I guess I hoped you might understand, after everything you saw in Ishbal.  What would you have done?  Would you have tried to hide Rose and her family?  I know you’re probably thinking_ Fullmetal don’t make it harder by blaming yourself, they would’ve died no matter how it played out, you didn’t put the gun to their heads, there was nothing you could’ve done. _You’re probably right.  So much bad has happened that I can’t even pick through it anymore, I just push it down and try and forget.  But I remember lying on the floor of that train, crammed between sweating bodies, feeling like a living curse.  Every good thing I ever had disappeared, every person I ever loved ended up ruined._

_I don’t know what to say about the camps.  I thought I’d been through hell before then but I was wrong.  When the trains pull in, they strip you down like animals, take everything you’re carrying, start separating you out into herds.  The men, the women, the able-bodied, the literate.  They cut off all my hair, registered me with a number, sent me to the showers.  Anyone who can’t work right away gets sent to a different shower, where they flood the chamber with poison gas.  I didn’t find that out until later.  And you know what I thought?  I thought, those lucky bastards.  They got out before us._

_I thought I was fucked right off the bat because of my automail.  I’d already designed a covering for it but you could still tell it was a prosthetic without my clothes.  I knew what happened to cripples at the camps.  But then I found myself standing in front of a Nazi officer with a pretty familiar face.  It was you.  That’s another thing—everyone in the other world has a counterpart, physically identical to the one in Amestris.  But the names are different, and the personalities too.  In this world you were a Nazi.  Standing in front of you, naked, mad with grief over Rose, I was pretty sure I was about to be sent to the showers.  But you looked at me and then you tossed me a uniform to cover my arm and leg and sent me to a work detail._

_I tried to find you again while I was in the camp but I never did.  But I couldn’t forget you either.  Couldn’t understand it.  Was there some part of you, the you I knew from Amestris, still looking out for me in the rottenest place on earth?  Or was I seeing what I wanted to see?  I guess I’ll never know that either, but sometimes that helped me keep going: that Colonel Bastard had told me I couldn’t give up, that I had to survive._

_Would this version of you have told me that? Would you have thought there was any hope, any reason to hope?  I did survive, though I don’t really know how.  They treat you like less than an animal in those camps, like you’re already dead and they’re stuck pushing around a bunch of corpses until they decay completely._

_Near the end, the Nazis knew the the Americans were going to win.  They had the fires going day and night, trying to kill as many as they could before the camp was shut down.  And then the airstrike came—bombs raining down everywhere, complete chaos.  An explosion threw me pretty hard and that’s when I felt the crackle of alchemical energy, for the first time since coming to that world.  I was bleeding out bad, but I suddenly remembered that array Al and I drew what felt like a hundred years ago, in our old house in Risembool. I thought of Rose and her family, what I’d done to them, of Al, wherever he was, Winry, my mom, even you—and I scratched out the array in the dirt, clapped my hands, and threw myself into the Gate._

_So that’s it, bastard.  That’s how I got back.  I still can’t really explain it.  I’ve got a theory about the reactions inside those American bombs, but trying to work it all out now just makes me tired.  I can’t think about it, not the war, not the camps, not Rose and her family, how I ruined their lives.  But it’s always there in my head, every second of the day.  I don’t know how to go back to life here, Colonel.  It feels like a dream, like I’ll wake up in my bunk in the camp, starving and freezing, the smell of burning flesh in the air.  I just think about that smell and it makes me gag.  How did you do it after Ishbal?  What happened in that world, in Europe?  Even if the war is over, how can anything go back to how it was after so many horrors?_

Don’t think about it, Fullmetal, _I’m sure your answer is.  Fair enough.  If you were looking for me to come back to Central and be the Fullmetal Alchemist again, know that guy’s gone.  I’ve seen enough war for a dozen lifetimes.  You can rip up this letter if you like, but at least I got to tell you about the Roy Mustang in the other world, and tell you thanks.  I’ve been wanting to do that._

_Anyway, stop by if you’re ever passing Risembool.  The weather’s been mild and beautiful; everything’s still green.  Winry’s been baking tons of pies. I don’t remember anything tasting so good.  And Al—I look at him in his body and I think that maybe something good came from being sent over there.  He wants to help me now, but I don’t know how to tell him that he does, just by existing.  Maybe everything that happened on the other side was the price to bring him back.  Equivalent exchange.  I could be at peace with that._

_Yours,_

_Edward Elric_

 


End file.
